New Clause 4
Education and Inspections Bill
11:45 am
Sarah Teather (Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Education & Skills; Brent East, Liberal Democrat)
Precisely. As I said, if the criteria are objective, as the code clearly states that they should be, it should not matter who administers them. The new clause would not remove schools’ ability to set their own criteria; it would simply ensure that they do not bend those criteria to cherry-pick.
Under the new clause, schools or the local authority—depending on who the admission authority is—would set admissions policies in line with the code. All schools would then submit their policies to, say, a local authority officer, who would administer the admissions. That would allow a layer of scrutiny so that the local authority could see whether the admissions policies were in line with the code, although we have not explicitly included provision for that in the new clause; the matter could be considered later.
Parents would then apply to the local authority with their school preferences, and the authority would sort the applications, matching children against the school’s stated criteria. Names could be kept from schools, especially if an electronic system were used; many local authorities now use such systems. The process could therefore be entirely anonymised, with a code, tag or number attached to the application so that even the officer would not know who the families on the system were. The local authority would then send out acceptance letters to parents and inform schools of their intake. Under that system, head teachers and governors would never see the list of names, so they could not pick out families with difficult parents or the children who they know are always in trouble with the police.
The Local Government Association thinks that the new clause would improve transparency, and individual councils to which we have spoken have also been enthusiastic about the idea of improving transparency and preventing cheating. Teachers’ unions have expressed considerable concern about allowing schools more freedom to set their own admissions and say that they would favour a more co-ordinated system. That can be achieved only by making the local authority the co-ordinator.
Let me reiterate. The new clause does not remove schools’ power to set their own criteria, but prevents them from cheating. That would be a helpful amendment to the Bill, and I strongly encourage the Government to accept it.